Preliminary Steps for the Reconstruction of Transylvanias Population
in the mid-18thearly 20th Centuries
Vlad Popovici
Babe-Bolyai University,
Centre for Population Studies /
68 Avram Iancu str., RO-400083, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
vladutpopovici@yahoo.com
Abstract
This short paper aims at highlighting the main
difficulties related to the process of building
the first large digital database of the popula-
tion from Transylvania (mid-18th to early 20th
centuries), as well as presenting the solutions
envisioned in order to ensure the success of
the project in the long run.
1 Introduction
The collection of demographic data from parish
registers in the territory of Transylvania has a
rather short history. After S.P. Bolovans (1999)
pioneering work, only one other systematic re-
search ended up published (Holom 2009). The
first institutional attempts took place after 2003,
within the Centre for Population Studies of the
Babe-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca, but it 2.1
regarded serial, non-nominal information and
their accuracy was (and still remains) hard to
verify. The information was gathered by stu-
dents, and in most cases the coordinators did not
have access to the original documents from vari-
ous county archives. However, due to this pre-
liminary effort, a series of small monographic
studies, dedicated to various settlements (mainly
villages) have been published, helping to estab-
lish the historical demography as one of the main
fields of research for the history of Transylvania.
Only after 2006 the modification of the restric-
tive archive legislation and the spread of digital
technology allowed the creation of a repository
of sources, implying that the coordinators can
now easily verify the collected data. However,
this repository is still in an early stage of con-
struction. Furthermore, the involvement of the
Centre for Population Studies in the EHPS-Net 1
1
European Historical Population Samples Network
(http://www.ehps-net.eu/).
project boosted the emergence of a nominal re-
construction program for the Transylvanian
population in the 18th20th centuries.
2 Starting small: Regedit
In this context, Regedit 2 was launcheda small
pilot project meant to cover, throughout 2014,
some of the preliminary stages of a future major
population reconstruction project. It aims mainly
at preparing a feasibility study which would con-
tain an evaluation of the effort implied by a fu-
ture extensive project in terms of finance, logis-
tics, time span and human resources. The time
frame chosen for Regedit roughly covers what is
referred to as modern-age Transylvania (mid
18thearly 20th centuries). The upper chronologi-
cal limit is 1914 and is regulated by the Roma-
nian Law covering vital registration (100 years).
Building a catalogue of sources
First stage is the creation of a unitary catalogue
of the existent parish registers (covering 16
county services of the Romanian National Ar-
chives and several bishopric and archbishopric
archives of various denominations).
Preliminary evaluations indicate that, for the
Transylvanian area, there are over 50,000 such
registers, covering seven major denominations,
written in five main languages and three alpha-
bets. This complexity adds much to the difficulty
of data extraction. One short term solution is at-
tracting palaeography specialists, though they are
usually preoccupied with documents of a more
narrative nature, and few of them would be will-
ing to help beyond a certain point. Under these
circumstances, on the medium and long term, the
2
The acronym roughly translates as: Electronic Resource
for the Management and Evidence of the Transylvanian
Historical Demography Sources. It involves one PI (Post-
Doctoral Researcher) and three volunteers (students), bene-
fiting from a minor grant (ca. 4,500 Euro).
training of a team of young specialists with rea-
sonably developed palaeographic abilities re-
mains the only viable solution. In this regard, the
Regedit project does imply the setup of an ex-
perimental advanced palaeography workshop,
open to students who have already graduated the
standard palaeography classes (two semesters),
and who are willing to learn more and to develop
their skills while extracting data from archive
sources.
Before 1895, parish registers represented the
only form of vital registration for Transylvania.
There are three main categories of them (bap-
tism, marriage, death) and some secondary ones
(engagement, confirmation, index). Parish regis-
ters also hold information on the geographical
origin of the individuals, midwife, vaccination,
baptism and marriage godparents, cause of death
and burial place, along with other minor men-
tions regarding particular groups of individuals
(e.g. children attending the parish primary school
or money landed by the parish to debtors). The
introduction of state civil registration in 1895
generated another category of vital registration
sources (state civil registration registers), without
eliminating the church registration. Theoreti-
cally, these two types of sources should back-up
each other (there is yet no study on their level of
overlapping), but since a great many of the old
civil registers are still found in the local archives
of municipalities, the parish registers, concen-
trated mainly in the county archives collections,
remain the main information source for histori-
ans.
2.2 Choosing a starting point
A second stage of the project shall consist of se-
lecting one to three micro-zones for which the
first population reconstruction activities should
be carried on. In selecting them, there are certain
mandatory aspects to be taken into account, such
as: a) the existence of complete series of sources
over at least five decades (preferably over
seven); b) the mixed ethnic and denominational
charactergiven the regional particularities, this
is required for the micro-zones to be regarded as
representative samples; while selecting only
mono-ethnical and mono-confessional micro-
zones would generate unquestionably valuable
results, important regional features, such as inter-
confessional and interethnic marriages or bap-
tisms would be highly underrepresented within
such communities; c) the presence of at least one
settlement that, on the basis of certain economic-
administrative particularities (industrial facilities,
railway-station, administrative centre) attracted
the migration from neighbouring area; d) the ex-
istence of archive documents that would offer
complementary information to the ones from the
parish registers (census and taxes records, school
archives, land registers, etc.). Through the initial
concentration of the research on these micro-
zones, in parallel with the work on database de-
velopment we aim at providing the first scientific
results.
2.3 Building a database
A third stage will consist of building an experi-
mental database, in order to test the applicability
of commonly employed best practices to the
Transylvanian case. The main challenge will be
to identify the proper solutions in order to create
a database fully compatible with the IDS 3 format
promoted within the EHPS-Net project (Alter
and Mandemakers 2012), while including all in-
formation (variables) in the sources.
The extraction of data (i.e. the building of the
database sources component) is due to start in
January 2014. The building process will follow
the best practices protocol provided by Mande-
makers and Dillon (2004). Literally transcribed
information will be included in the first compo-
nent of the database (the sources) avoiding any
form of abbreviation or minimal standardization.
The cleansing operations will consist of filling in
missing data (due to deteriorated sources) and
correcting errors generated during the sources
creation (among the most frequent: wrong
month/year of registration, wrong age of mar-
riage/death). Standardization will imply abbre-
viations and uniform style of event-dates. An
important aspect pertaining to standardization of
event-dates will be correlation between the Julian
calendar (used by Romanian and Serbian Eastern
Orthodoxes) and the Gregorian calendar (used by
all other confessions, including Romanian and
Ruthenian Greek-Catholics). Name standardiza-
tion (person names and toponyms) will imply the
creation of cross-language onomastical and
toponymical catalogues, and a solution regarding
the forced Magyarization of names that took
place between 1880s1918 is yet to be devel-
oped. For example, someone baptised as Ioan
Negrea [John Black], could have married as
Fekete Jnos and died either as Ioan Negrea,
Fekete Jnos or Ioan Fecheteall these
3
Intermediate Data Structure for Longitudinal Historical
Microdata.
name changes depending only on the priest/clerk
that registered the events.
Some of the problems faced during standardi-
zation will also reflect on record linkagea
mandatory step implied by best practices. Espe-
cially the differences among very old parish reg-
isters, such as the lack of important variables
(e.g. newlyweds age/date of birth, parents
names for married or deceased), together with
the lack of any previous regional scientific enter-
prises in the field, prevent us from delivering at
this point anything more than general, theoretical
statements. For example, due to the lacunose na-
ture of information provided by some types of
parish registers, it seems very improbable that
rules-based linkage could be employed at a large
scale for vital registration prior to year 1858
(when the fields of information in parish regis-
ters were, up to a degree, regulated by Law, in
the entire Habsburg Empire). With name and
surname remaining the only individual identifi-
ers, given the Transylvanian onomastic habits
and family structure, it would be impossible to
make a clear choice between members of the
same extended family/clan who lived in the same
village and bore the same first name. However,
starting with 1860s, this method has the potential
to become the backbone for both intra- and inter-
community record linkage. Regarding fuzzy
matching, it would be only fair to underline that
both the projects amplitude (time span and fi-
nancial resources), and the state of knowledge in
the field at local and regional level determined us
not to envision its employment. For very old reg-
isters, given the small number of variables, it is
hard to evaluate up to which point fuzzy match-
ing could prove a solution. For the period after
1858, this method would be most welcomed
within a large-scale project, but as stated, it sur-
passes the means and aims of Regedit.
As a result of the cleansing, standardization
and linkage operations, the second component
(central database) will emerge. Given the pro-
jects experimental nature, the Romanian state of
research in the field and the need of an as wide
as possible feedback, we intend to release the full
version of the central database, hoping to stimu-
late interest among fellows from other fields (es-
pecially informatics and linguistics). Any re-
searcher will be able to gain access to the sample
databases and, on demand, to the digital copies
of the sources, in order to verify the accuracy of
input data.
3 Looking forward
After the completion of the three aforementioned
stages, we will obtain the first samples of popu-
lation reconstruction in Transylvania by the end
of 2014, which together with the published scien-
tific results, should validate our project and jus-
tify the expansion of the research. The main pub-
lished result will consist of a study on parish reg-
isters as historical demography sources for Tran-
sylvania, with special emphasis on their usage in
building large population databases. Also, by the
projects end, a quantitative estimation of the
necessary effort to cover the entire area of Tran-
sylvania will be available, together with internal
use protocols regarding data entry, cleansing and
standardization adapted to the specificity of re-
gional sources and to the state of Romanian re-
search in the field. These results, although mod-
est compared to the state of the art, should help
in reaching the Regedits main objective: offer-
ing a stepping stone for the development of fu-
ture Romanian scientific initiatives in the field of
population reconstruction.
Acknowledgments
This paper was prepared within the framework of
the REGEDIT project, supported by Babe-
Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca through grant
GTC_34024/2013.
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